


blue skies are calling

by TheJGatsby



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, F/M, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-03-26 00:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3830074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy and Clarke have known each other almost all their lives. Along with Octavia, they were a childhood trio, inseperable. Life got in the way, though, and two of them drifted apart, but when tragedy strikes again and again in a few months, Clarke runs away, and Bellamy, as he always has, runs after her. Picking up Raven for the ride, Bellamy embarks on a day-long road trip adventure chasing Clarke's trail as she rights wrongs and tries to learn how to cope with life as it is now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work for The 100, and... my first really long fic. Eep! I've actually got practically the whole thing written, and it looks like it'll be six or seven chapters all told. The title comes from the Noah and the Whales song "Blue Skies," and there's a lot of reasons I picked it that I won't go into right now. Enjoy!

 

When Bellamy was seven and Octavia was four, the Griffins moved in down the street. They had a daughter named Clarke, a headstrong, friendly little girl who wasted no time in becoming the very best of friends with Bellamy’s little sister, who was her age, and, as a result, Bellamy himself, who was just enough older to be a novelty, but not so much older that he was above playing with his sister and her friend.

When Bellamy was nine and Clarke was six, she made all the rules. Octavia often helped, but for the most part Clarke’s rules were agreed upon as fair by them and whatever other neighborhood kids were around to join in. The only one who routinely disagreed was Bellamy, and occasionally he could get backup, but usually Clarke reigned supreme.

When Clarke and Octavia were both ten, they agreed that boys were disgusting and not to be interacted with for any reason at all whatsoever, and they signed a pact in glitter pen to assure that they would never, ever speak to another boy. A week later they were back to wrestling over the TV remote with Bellamy, having added a clause to their contract that specified that, technically, brothers weren’t _actually_ boys.

When Bellamy was sixteen, he got his driver’s license, rocketing Octavia (and, by extension, Clarke) to eighth-grade celebrity, as they were the ones with a chauffeur who wasn’t someone’s mom, and therefore was approximately three million times cooler.

When the girls were fourteen, they went to their first high school party and, to Bellamy’s surprise, it was Octavia who called him, sober, to come pick them up, telling him that Clarke (levelheaded, responsible, conscientious Clarke) had gotten utterly wasted and was about half a second from passing out. She slept over at their house that night and the next, as she often did, because woe be to her should the formidable Abby Griffin encounter a daughter reeking of alcohol.

When Bellamy was eighteen, a tired businessman going through a difficult divorce brought Bellamy's future crashing down by drinking and driving and sending Bellamy and Octavia’s mother’s car spinning off the highway into a ditch, killing her instantly. The promising star student-slash-star athlete-slash-prom king waved goodbye to a full-ride baseball scholarship to study history and the classics, instead picking up an after-school job as an office janitor, and after graduation another job as a museum security guard (because he may have lost the chance to learn history but goddammit he was not going to be kept from it). The precious time he’d spent with his sister and her (his) best friend waned to almost nothing, and he found himself replaced in their outings by a boy named Wells, who was clever, but too serious, too obliging to keep Octavia in line and too soft-spoken to challenge Clarke. Bellamy recognized that his time with them was over, but he couldn’t help being bitter that they had picked someone so subpar to take his place. At least, that was what he told himself. The truth of the matter was that Bellamy hated losing his position as most important boy in Clarke Griffin’s life, for reasons he refused to acknowledge at the time but started with the letter L. He could accept his sister being friends with Wells, and she wasn’t particularly close to the boy anyway, but he was just plain, petty jealous over Clarke.

Now, Bellamy was twenty-one and Octavia was eighteen, and Clarke Griffin was about to take life-as-they-knew-it and flip it all upside-down.

 

* * *

Almost everyone has cleared away from the graveside, but Clarke is still standing resolute by the hole, staring down into the darkness where her father’s husk lay. Her mother is speaking to her, and Bellamy can see that Abby is getting frustrated, but Clarke continues not listening, so Bellamy tells the distraught Octavia to go on with Wells and Jasper and Monty and the others, that he’ll be right behind them, and then he trudges over to where Clarke’s mother is growing increasingly upset, grief and irritation warring for dominance on her face.

Bellamy places a hand on Abby’s shoulder and says quietly, “Go ahead, Mrs. Griffin, I’ll stay with her.” Abby nods and heads off for the parking lot. The young man stands next to his friend, pretending to look into the grave as well, but really watching her out of the corner of his eye.

After a long time, Clarke breaks the silence. “He wanted to be cremated.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “He told me so, he said he wanted to be _cremated_ , he wrote it down, I told Mom, and she still had him buried.” Her voice starts to shake with tears. “One thing. She just had to do one goddamn thing right, for once. Care about what someone else wanted, for once. But no. Abby _fucking_ Griffin has to have a _fucking_ grave to show off with. She doesn’t care about him, she never did. She doesn’t care about him, or me, or anyone, and I want to hate her but I can’t because she’s my mom, but I want to so much because he’s- was- my dad, and he only wanted one thing with his death.” She collapses in on herself, and Bellamy reaches out, pulling her in to sob into his chest. It’s the first time they've spoken in months, but it doesn’t feel like it.

“If you have a match, we can cremate him right now,” Bellamy says softly, rubbing a comforting hand over her back. She laughs weakly, a shaky sound wet with tears.

“I’m pretty sure there are rules against that,” she murmurs into his shirt.

He rests his cheek on top of her head. “We’ll get Octavia to do it, she doesn’t give a good goddamn about rules.” Clarke laughs again, and this time it sounds a little less pathetic, a little more like her. For a while longer they stand like that, Clarke’s sobs drying up as Bellamy’s hold and his gentle hands soothe her.

When she’s done crying, she says, “Bell, I don’t wanna walk all the way back to the car.” He nods solemnly and crouches down with his back to her so the much smaller girl can climb up and wrap her arms around his neck, burying her face in his shoulder. He hitches her up on his back, his hands underneath her knees. He doesn’t say a word the whole way back to his car, knowing that, for the fiercely independent Clarke, the act of asking him to do something, especially something as simple as going to the car, shows that she is hurting far, far more deeply than anyone but her knows.

When she’s situated in the passenger seat, before closing the door, he leans down and asks gently, “Do you wanna go back to your house for the reception?”

She shakes her head. “I just want to rest.”

“Of course, princess.”

On the drive back to the Blake house, Clarke’s eyes flutter shut, and Bellamy isn’t sure whether she’s asleep or just trying to hide herself away from the world, but either way, he gently pulls her from the passenger seat and carries her upstairs, pausing for a moment on the landing. He can hear Octavia crying through her closed door, though, so he walks to his room and lays Clarke down gently in his bed, pulling off her shoes and tucking the blankets over her shoulders. He sits down on the edge of the bed for a moment and sends a text to Clarke’s mother to tell her that Clarke is at their house, then he looks down and sees her eyes are open.

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

The corner of his mouth turns up in the barest hint of a smile, the best he can muster at the time. “Don’t mention it, princess.” He leans over to kiss her forehead in the most brotherly way he can muster, and she sighs and closes her eyes. For a few minutes he stays, sitting on the edge of the bed, until her breathing evens out and her face takes on the familiar slackness of sleep. Then he stands and heads down the hall to check on Octavia, who has cried herself to sleep. He repeats the process, removing her shoes and tucking her in before kissing her forehead and shutting the door quietly behind him.

It’s not until he’s downstairs, leaning back in the couch he’ll sleep in that night, that he starts to cry- for, even though Clarke was the only one who lived under the same roof, Jake Griffin was just as much a father to the Blake children as his own daughter, and Bellamy’s strength only lasts as long as it has to for Octavia and Clarke’s sake.

* * *

It is a few weeks later that Bellamy attends his third ever funeral, and he feels responsible in some small way for this one.

No, he had nothing to do with the knife fight that Wells got in the middle of, ever the stupid, valiant peacemaker trying to stop it. Rather, Bellamy feels that years of jealousy and wishing Wells would fall out of favor so that he could un-lose his place in Clarke and Octavia’s friendship have finally come back to bite him. But he wasn’t there. He hadn’t seen the blood pooling too fast around Wells’s neck, creating underneath him an island of red all his own. He hadn’t been the one to punch a paramedic in the face to ride in the ambulance. He wasn’t the one screaming and shouting and fighting relentlessly with the doctors telling them that they’re wrong and it doesn’t matter how much blood he’s lost, that Wells can’t be dead. He wasn’t the one who grabbed a butterfly needle off the nearest cart, shoved it in the vein at the crook of the elbow and shouted, sobbing, at the doctors that however much blood Wells needed, he could have. He wasn’t the one who had to be physically restrained and sedated when time of death was announced.

No, that was all Clarke.

But Bellamy was the one who went to the hospital and sat by her side, since her mother was at a conference for cardiovascular surgeons in New York and wouldn’t be back for days, although he found out later that Clarke had saved his number as her emergency contact, deleting her mother’s information entirely from her phone, so the hospital never even called Abby. Bellamy was there when she woke up, dazed and bleary, and Bellamy was the one who told her, as gently as he could, that Wells was dead. Bellamy was the one who held her and combed his fingers through her hair as she dry-sobbed, her tears having all been spent already. It was at Bellamy’s house that she stayed until the funeral, and it was Bellamy who ensured that she and Octavia woke up in the morning and, at the very least, showered and ate before he had to leave for work. He didn’t expect them to go to school, no one did, and it didn’t particularly matter anyway since it was the last few months of senior year. Most nights, the girls were already asleep when he got home, either both in Octavia’s bed or Clarke in his bed.

About four days after Wells’ funeral, though, Bellamy walked into his house to find Clarke sitting on the couch with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring at the blank TV screen as if she could find answers there, or maybe an escape from the deep melancholy clouding her face. He sat down sideways next to her, one leg tucked under him and the other over the side, arms crossed and resting on the back of the couch with his chin on top. He looked at Clarke for a long minute before saying, “How are you doing, princess?”

“Why does this keep happening to me?” She turned her head to look at him and he barely managed to catch his breath at the profound sadness in her crystal blue eyes. “Did I do something wrong?”

He shook his head, reaching for her hand and entwining their fingers atop her knee. “No. Jake and Wells are not your fault, okay? There was nothing you could have done. Sometimes life is just a bitch, Clarke.”

She rested her forehead on their joined hands and was silent for a long moment. “I just miss them so much.” Her voice broke on the last word, and then, for the first time since the day Wells had died, she wept again. It was loud and ugly, gasping and wailing with her arms wrapped around her middle and Bellamy’s arms wrapped around her. When she ran out of sobs, he didn’t let go and just held her, shuddering and hiccupping, until she drifted off to sleep. Even then he waited about ten minutes to shift her in his arms and carry her up to his bed. He laid her down and tucked her in, but as he turned to go she caught him by the wrist and asked him quietly to stay. He nodded and laid down on top of the blankets, just staring at her for an awkward moment before reaching out and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, his hand trailing down to her shoulder and then down to take her hand and wrap it in both of his. Ignoring the better judgment telling him not to, he kissed her knuckles gently and let their joined hands lie in the space between them.

If, in the morning, Octavia walked in to find they’d moved during the night, and Bellamy had somehow ended up under the blankets with Clarke curled into his chest, his body curving around hers and her small form wrapped in his embrace, she didn’t say anything. If Bellamy woke up first and thought about how he wished he could hold her like this every night, he didn’t say anything. If Clarke woke up later and felt, for the first time since her father’s death, that the world had finally stopped spinning out of control and everything seemed to slow down and stabilize when she was in his arms, and she’d give just about anything to have this feeling of comfort and safety and just okay-ness again (and again and again and again and maybe every night forever), she didn’t say anything either.

* * *

As if all that weren’t enough, as if death and loss and fighting with her mother over college (Clarke had picked her first choice, which wasn’t Abby’s first choice, which resulted in a screaming, door-slamming fight and Clarke climbing out her window and climbing into Octavia’s and not going home for a week) and a sudden fight with Octavia (over something stupid and pointless, Clarke making a snide remark about Octavia and her boyfriend Lincoln and the fact that they were going to the same school, some bitchy crack about an M-R-S degree that resulted in the silent treatment) wasn’t all hardship enough, the last straw came the night after the last day of finals.

Clarke had been dating Finn for several months, and Bellamy had always had a bad feeling about the guy. Generally, he was gregarious and charming, well liked and intelligent. He seemed to dote on Clarke, but Bellamy felt that he was just too good to be true. He’d attributed the gut feeling to jealousy, hating the fact that Finn had Clarke, and hating the fact that Finn was everything Bellamy was not- even-tempered where he was hot-headed, cheerful where he was stoic and brooding, and worst of all, headed on a full ride baseball scholarship to the college of his dreams, where Bellamy had lost that same opportunity due to life being, as he’d told Clarke, a bitch. Whatever the reason, Bellamy never liked Finn.

It was from Clarke that he found out what had happened, in a roundabout way. He overheard her relating the story to Octavia in a cool, detached tone that scared him more than anything. Clarke Griffin was never cool and detached. She was passion and soul and rash, emotional decisions, and for all she seemed to be down-to-earth and thoughtful, to those who knew her as well as the Blake siblings did, it was well known that her heart led, and her brain just happened to agree a lot of the time.

What had happened was that Clarke had, as she had many times before, snuck out to Finn’s house late at night. This time, unlike all the others, she hadn’t told him beforehand, wanting it to be a surprise. When she got there, she climbed in the window and turned to see him with another girl on top of him, both naked and moaning. (Much later, when she cries about it, she tells Octavia it felt like the world had fallen out from under her feet). Finn sat up quickly and choked out the blonde’s name. She shook her head at him for a moment, tears brimming in her eyes, as the other girl got off of him and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, looking back and forth from Finn to Clarke to Finn to Clarke.

“What the hell?” said the other girl, her voice quiet but full of fury.

Clarke gritted her teeth, holding back tears, and looked the girl in the eye. “Hello,” she said coldly. “I’m Clarke, and I guess one of us is the other woman.” With that, she turned and climbed back out the window, and didn’t notice until she was already there that she had walked to the Blake house, not her own. She knocked on Octavia’s door, and while the Blake girl opened the door angry, when she saw Clarke’s face she let go of whatever dumb, pointless thing she had been mad about and hugged her best friend tightly.

* * *

Two days later, Octavia is headed out the door to go with Lincoln to visit his family in Hawaii. Her hands are on Clarke’s shoulders, and she is looking her friend sternly in the face as she says, “And you’re sure you’ll be okay if I go? A hundred percent, no lie?”

“No lie,” Clarke promises with a small smile. “I’ll be fine, and even if I’m not, you’re not around for Bellamy to worry over so I get all of his overbearing big-brotherness until you get back. There is absolutely no way anything bad could possibly happen.” The two girls hug again, and then Octavia is being tugged out the door by Lincoln, still looking over her shoulder and reminding Clarke and Bellamy to look after each other, call if anything happens, et cetera.

The two on the porch wave until Lincoln’s car is out of sight, and then they turn to each other with a grin. “Video games?” Bellamy asks.

“Video games,” Clarke affirms.

They spend the next few hours engrossed in a wildly competitive series of shoot-em-up video games in the Blake living room, shouting and swearing at each other and even getting into it physically at one point when Clarke smacks Bellamy’s arm and he shoves her and before they know it they’re rolling around on the floor, laughing and wrestling like kids, while on the game their other friends absolutely obliterate them. For a few games, they team up against the forces of Jasper-and-Monty and Miller-and-Murphy, but the dynamic duo of Clarke-and-Bellamy is, as always, utterly unstoppable, and they sweep away the competition over and over again. Their friends grumble good-naturedly about telepathy as they listen to the two do the stupid secret handshake high five they came up with when they were sixteen and thirteen and first found out that not only was Clarke somewhat of a prodigy with a virtual gun, but also that she and Bellamy made an awesome team. They disagreed more often than not, and even when they agreed they tended to do it loudly and argumentatively, but no one would ever mistake them for anything but the best of friends when they worked together.

As it was growing dark outside, they shut off the game and went to heat up leftover pizza, excitedly reliving the highlights of the game and completely forgetting about the hardships of the past few months. For the first time in a while, Clarke feels feather-light and cheerful, the ease and comfort and fun of being with her friends having chased away the gloom that had been hanging over her for days. That night, she falls asleep on Bellamy’s shoulder while watching an old black-and-white movie, and she wakes up the next morning in Octavia’s bed.

The next night, she falls asleep in her own bed.

The morning after that, she is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Bellamy Blake and the Griffin parents, as Clarke and Octavia’s designated adults, have had an understanding for years. They always kept each other updated on where the girls were- if Clarke ended up at Octavia’s house, Bellamy would text Jake Griffin (because Jake was the parent everyone preferred) and tell him so. If the girls left, the attending grown-up would tell the other where they were going and when they were back. That way, Bellamy and Abby and Jake were always aware of the girls’ whereabouts and relatively assured of their safety.

The day Clarke disappears, Bellamy wakes up to a text from Abby asking if she is at his house, because Jake’s car and Clarke are both gone, but she left her cell phone. This sets Bellamy worrying, and he immediately starts asking Clarke and Octavia’s friends if they have seen her. There is a resounding, echoing ‘no’ from everyone. She isn’t with Jasper or Monty, not at the Jaha house, and not with any of the other friends Bellamy knows of. As the list of places she could be narrows, Bellamy’s worry grows, and he finally gets a call from Abby.

“Have you found her yet?” he asks immediately upon picking up. “None of her friends have seen her.”

“No,” Abby replies, her voice strained with worry, “but I got a call from Finn a minute ago.” Bellamy grinds his teeth at the sound of the asshole’s name.

“What did he say?”

“Clarke called him and left a message, he said he knows where she is. But, Bellamy, I called the police. There’s nothing they can do, she’s eighteen so she isn’t a runaway, she’s probably not even technically a missing adult if we have proof she’s okay and left voluntarily. You know she wouldn’t do anything stupid- Clarke is a good kid.” The rest of Abby’s request goes unsaid, because Bellamy knows, because Bellamy has heard it a hundred times before- she’s busy with work, with her hyper-demanding job as world-famous mega-doctor, and needs Bellamy to pick up the parental slack. A hundred times before, he had done it, and now is no different.

“Just text me Finn’s number.” He hangs up and pulls on yesterday’s jeans, running out the door in such a worried rush that he nearly puts his shoes on the wrong feet. As soon as he gets the text, he calls Finn. 

* * *

_“Hey you cheating cheater piece of shit, it’s your girlfriend. The blonde one. Clarke. In case you have other blonde girlfriends I don’t know about yet. Anyway I’m just calling to let you know I’m at the place where you first lied to me- because, let’s be honest, if you ever loved Raven or me, you wouldn’t have done what you did- and it’s ugly and terrible, just like you. I’m here symbolically, to get you out of my life, where you never belonged, because you were Raven’s from the moment I met you. I want you to know I don’t resent her, and I hope to god she doesn’t resent me, because you’re the asshole and if anyone’s deserving of hate it’s you. I’m saying goodbye to whatever fake bullshit we may have shared, because it was never mine. It was Raven’s. You were Raven’s. Everything you gave me, all the sweet words and pretty gifts and subpar sex was always Raven’s, and I stole it, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for making me a thief. Goodbye forever, Finn.”_

* * *

“Hello?”

“Finn, this is Bellamy, I’m looking for Clarke, do you know where she is?” The words fall out in a rush as Bellamy sits in his car, tapping impatiently at the steering wheel. He’s snappy and cold towards the boy, but he doesn’t care. Bad enough Clarke is missing, but to be asking for help from Finn is an exercise in swallowing his pride.

“Um, yes, I think she might be at this nature preserve a town over,” he replies, confused. “She called me this morning and left a voicemail.” He quickly gives Bellamy directions to the park.

“You better be right,” Bellamy nearly growls. “Oh, and Finn?”

“What?”

“Just so you understand- what you did to Clarke and Raven is abhorrent in any context, but you need to get that Clarke is probably the most genuinely good person you will ever be in the same zip code as, and you hurt her immensely.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, trying to rein in his anger with the guy who could so callously hurt Clarke. “You really, really fucked up.”

“Trust me,” Finn says, his voice pained. “I know.”

“No, you don’t.” With that, Bellamy hangs up and grips the steering wheel, praying with everything he has that Clarke is at the park when he gets there, but fearing she won’t be.

His fears come true when he arrives at the nature preserve and, barely taking the time to park his car, bursts through the doors of the ranger station, asking if they’ve seen a girl, eighteen, this tall, long wavy blonde hair.

“Yeah,” says one ranger, Atom. “She was in here about an hour, hour and a half ago. She used the phone and got directions to the store.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not that Finn guy she called, right?”

“No, I’m not- can you tell me what store you sent her to?” Bellamy has trouble not sounding impatient, because as much as he knows this guy doesn’t understand how dire this is, he still wants to be on the road _right now_ to wherever she is.

Atom rattles off the directions and Bellamy nods, rushing out the door as quickly as he came in. “I hope you find her!” the ranger calls after him, but the young man is already gone.

* * *

Bellamy had been protecting Octavia and Clarke from the evils of boys for as long as he could remember- not that either of them ever needed much protecting. For the most part, if a boy pulled Clarke’s pigtails, she punched him in the nose, and if a boy pulled Octavia’s pigtails, she screamed, and Clarke would run over and punch him in the nose. When the girls were about seven, Clarke taught Octavia to throw a punch, and from then on, both girls looked after themselves as far as teasing, hair-pulling boys went, and got into their fair share of trouble for it, too.

The first time he really had to step in for them was at a Halloween party Octavia threw when she was twelve, when he heard Clarke scream “Don’t touch me!” and rushed in to find that a game of spin the bottle had gone horribly awry when Clarke had had to kiss a boy and he’d tried to get more out of it by groping her breast. Bellamy arrived as Clarke and the boy were wrestling on the ground, him having gotten good sock to the jaw for his trouble and then tackling her to the floor. His friends laughed and cheered him on, one of them holding Octavia back from joining the fight as the other girls sat around gaping and aghast at the spectacle. Fifteen-year-old Bellamy, full of bravado and very taken with the new muscles puberty had given him, wasted no time in pulling the molester off of Clarke by the armpits and tossing him down onto the floor. He hit the ground with a high-pitched yelp, and Bellamy grabbed the two of his friends holding onto Octavia by the collars, yanking them away from her, shouting furiously that didn’t they have any fucking respect, and they needed to leave _now_ , and if he ever saw any of them around Clarke or Octavia again they’d be sorry as hell. Those boys never gave the girls any more trouble, but the middle-school rumor mill elevated Bellamy to epic hero status amongst the girls of the seventh grade, and Octavia became very popular for a while as they all wanted to meet her brother, the knight in shining armor. Clarke was very huffy for a long time, and though she said it was because she hadn’t needed Bellamy to save her, which was true, the real reason for her attitude was that she felt possessive of him- after all, she’d had a crush on him first.

The girls had always been easy on Bellamy as far as romance went, with Octavia never really brave enough to talk to anyone she had a crush on, and Clarke only really having a short fling with a girl named Lexa the summer before her sophomore year. They’d been on the same soccer team in the summer league, but when the fall rolled around, the relationship quickly fizzled out in the heat of the rivalry between their two schools. The third game of the season had been between their schools, and if their romance had been strained before, there was no prayer for it when the clock buzzed halftime. Both girls were captains and their knowledge of each others’ playing styles, coupled with the intensity of their individual personalities, resulted in a clash for the ages. There were three total injuries, and both captains almost had to get red-carded when they nearly got into a fight on the field. Coaches said they’d never seen junior-varsity girls soccer like that, and were both impressed and concerned.

It wasn’t until senior year that both girls found their first real loves- Octavia with the handsome, stoic army-brat transfer student Lincoln, an artist and a romantic behind his tough and somewhat intimidating exterior, and Clarke with Finn. Bellamy disliked Lincoln from the start, on protective-older-brother principle, but the kid grew on him after a while and eventually Octavia’s brother was grudgingly fond of her boyfriend, because he respected her, kept her out of trouble, treated her right, and adored her about as much as Bellamy did.

Finn, on the other hand, got the same treatment, but the dislike only worsened, coming to outright hatred when Bellamy found Clarke crying on Octavia’s shoulder over Christmas break, and, upon eavesdropping, found out there was a pregnancy scare, and utter radio silence from Finn. Bellamy knew then that his gut instinct had been right, and the jerk had never been anywhere near good enough for Clarke. He’d told her so, and there had been a loud, door-slamming fight between them, wherein Clarke told Bellamy that he wasn’t her brother, and he definitely wasn’t her dad, and he wouldn’t even be her friend anymore either if he tried to control her life. Bellamy responded by telling her that she obviously couldn’t control her own life very well if she was ruining it with a guy like Finn. They didn’t speak for a week, during which time Clarke found out she wasn’t pregnant, and Finn miraculously reappeared in her life the minute the plastic stick came up negative.

Once Clarke and Bellamy started talking again, apologies heard, as always, without having to be said, she started to worry that he’d been right, and maybe Finn was bad news. The minute the Raven situation had come up, Clarke had braced herself for an ‘I told you so’ from Bellamy, but gradually relaxed as it never came. She mentioned it at some point, that she had been expecting him to be at least a little smug since he’d warned her, and he’d just shook his head in surprise and told her that trying to tell her Finn wasn’t a good guy had never been about being right, but rather about looking after Clarke. What he didn’t tell her was that a small but strong part of his reluctance to accept Finn had been jealousy and envy in equal parts, an unwillingness to lose whatever he still had of her coupled with bitter resentment that Finn had what Bellamy wanted: Clarke, in her entirety.

Bellamy had been aware of his feelings for Clarke for years. He’d tried to write them off as simple sibling affection warped by the fact that he and Clarke weren’t related by blood, but eventually he had to stop denying that his feelings for Clarke were entirely different from his love for Octavia. It wasn’t just that he found her attractive, which, holy hell, he definitely did (and thought he should feel more awkward about it than he did). Honestly, his mouth went dry just thinking about the curve of her neck and the feel of her skin and the way she moved when she and Octavia were dancing in the kitchen in the mornings. He knew for a fact his hand could stretch almost all the way across her back, and he spent an uncomfortable amount of time longing to do just that- run his hands over her body and pull her close and feel her against him, bodies flush and fitting together like halves of a whole. No, mere physical attraction would be one thing, something weird and uncomfortable but manageable and easy enough to write off and ignore. Bellamy’s feelings were something entirely more difficult.

It was what he wanted from the small moments that made him realize he loved her. It was all the nights she fell asleep on his shoulder and he carried her up to bed, then had to resist the urge to crawl in with her and wrap her in his arms. It was when they won whatever stupid video game they were playing and he wanted to pick her up and spin her around and kiss her in victory. It was seeing her crying after the funerals or Finn’s betrayal and wanting to hold her close and wipe away her tears and never let her go. It was a fierce protectiveness that rivaled that he harbored for Octavia, a feeling that made him certain he would die for her if he had to, without a thought. It was the fact that he was happiest when she was there, and every good future he could imagine had her in it. As far as he figured, Bellamy was going to be hopelessly in love with Clarke Griffin for the rest of his life, and he couldn’t do anything about it. He’d become the boy he always wanted to protect her from- desperately in love yet nowhere near good enough for her. He wanted to be better. For her, he wanted to be everything good and wonderful. But he was doomed to be just a lovesick side character in the play of Clarke’s life, always in the wings, watching someone else share her limelight, happy for her happiness but heartbroken that he wasn’t a part of it.

* * *

As soon as Bellamy parks in the lot of the store, he sends a text to Octavia. _Call me as soon as you can_ , it reads, _very very important_. He hurries into the store and immediately rushes up to the service desk, asking if, in the past two hours, they have seen a girl fitting Clarke’s description. The pimply college kid behind the desk shrugs and points out a few of the cashiers who have been there for at least two hours, and Bellamy starts asking all of them.

“I saw her,” says one girl, named Fox. “I remember because she had a cake that said, ‘I’m sorry your boyfriend cheated on you with me’ and when I asked she got all sad and bitter and said she hadn’t known about the other girl, but that she wanted to make sure she didn’t hate her.”

Bellamy nods through the story, trying again to be more patient than he feels. “Did she say where she was going?”

The cashier chews on the inside of her cheek for a moment. “I’m gonna guess she was headed to see the other girlfriend, because she said she was ‘on a quest to start making things right,’ quote-endquote.” Bellamy thanks her and almost runs back to his car.

In the car, he takes a moment to swallow his pride before pulling out his phone and dialing Finn Collins again. “Hello?”

“Finn, it’s Bellamy again, I need your girlfriend’s address.” He pauses. “Sorry I forgot you’re a cheating fuckwad- the girlfriend Clarke caught you with, what was her name? Rachel? Rebecca?”

“Raven,” Finn sighs, and rattles off her address.

“Got it.”

“She wasn’t at the park, then?” Finn asks.

“Gone by the time I got there- what’s it to you?” Bellamy says coldly.

Finn huffs. “Believe it or not, I do care about Clarke.”

Bellamy pauses, pretending to consider it. “No, I don’t believe it. Wanna know why?”

“Why?”

“Because you were cheating!” Bellamy shouts into the phone, before hanging up and turning his fury back towards the road.

Almost an hour later, he pulls into the driveway of Raven’s apartment and almost starts crying with relief when he sees Jake Griffin’s car parked in the driveway. He takes the stairs up to her apartment double-time and bangs on the door, shouting Clarke’s name.

A pretty, fierce-looking girl with dark, almond shaped eyes that are beautiful despite being red-rimmed, and high-boned olive cheeks that are lovely even tear-streaked, opens the door and says tiredly, “She’s not here.”

Bellamy deflates immediately, his elation at having found Clarke crashing down like the Hindenburg. “Her car is here, though.”

Raven sighs, resting her forehead on the doorframe. “She showed up about two hours ago with this apology cake and we talked and cried for a while, and I gave her a ride to the bus depot. She told me that if a tall guy with curly dark hair and a perma-frown showed up looking for her, to tell him she was fine and safe and not to bother going after her, because she was on a mission and she didn’t want him driving after her all night. I assume she meant you.”

“Which bus depot?” Bellamy asks, undeterred by Clarke’s secondhand refusal of his help.

The other girlfriend- or maybe just ‘the girlfriend,’ since she had come first, and, technically, Clarke was the mistress- smiles a small, bitterly sad smile. “She told me you wouldn’t listen.”

“Which bus depot?” he asks again, a little more urgently.

“I’ll save you the trip- I went in after her and asked the ticket booth lady where she was headed. She bought a ticket for Ark City, and it’ll have left by now. If you drive, you might make it there before her.” She casts her eyes down to the welcome mat under Bellamy’s feet. “She’s lucky to have someone who cares about her so much. I hope you find her. She seemed like a really nice girl.”

Bellamy hesitates, not quite wanting to leave. It feels in that moment as though, while it’s strange and uncharacteristic and probably somewhat inappropriate, it’s something he needs to do, as though this whole adventure belongs as much to Raven as it does to Clarke and Bellamy and Octavia, and so he says, “This is going to sound weird, but do you want to come with me?”

Raven meets his eyes. “Road trip with a random stranger to find the runaway kid my ex was cheating on me with?” Bellamy grimaces and Raven laughs quietly. “It sounds like a terrible comedy movie, count me in. Let me go put on shoes.”

She also brings with her a satchel full of road trip supplies- junk food, a change of clothes, and an impressive collection of classic rock CDs. She’s unimpressed with Bellamy’s car, a shitty Ford something-or-other that was old when he got it, used, five years ago, and he finds out that she is, quote, ‘the best goddamn mechanic you’re ever likely to meet, Bellamy Blake.’ They share taste in ACDC and Metallica, but after a couple dozen miles, Bellamy finally has to ask: “So, Raven, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but what’s the story with you and Finn?”

Raven stares out the window for a long time before replying, “The long and short of it is that I’ve known him as long as I can remember, and I’ve loved him since I knew what love is. I don’t think I would’ve made it this far without Finn, and I don’t know how I’m gonna go on without him now, but hell if I’m going to be that weakass girl who stays with a cheating piece of shit because she thinks she needs him. I’ll be fine on my own.” She takes a deep breath and huffs it out. “And, honestly? If he ever loved me half as much as I love him, he would never have even looked twice at another girl.”

* * *

Raven’s story is something out of a inspiration-porn movie about kids from the ‘hood, but Bellamy knows better than to pity her. She grew up in the section-eight apartment next to Finn, him living there because his mother was dead and his dad couldn’t hold a job the way he held his liquor, and her because her mom truly loved only two things, neither of which were Raven, and both of which were hazardous to her daughter’s wellbeing. As a point of fact, Raven’s mother saw her as only an extra welfare check, ensuring that there was more money to go towards the real loves of her life- heroin and men who would treat her like trash.

Their mutually unhappy situations resulted in both of them finding comfort with each other, and they quickly became a team (“When we were working together, we were unstoppable,” Raven says to Bellamy, and he is reminded of himself and Clarke, and the worry for her grows in his gut). The two kids found safe places to hide when their parents weren’t good to be around, figured out which neighbors tended to have extra food for two big-eyed hungry urchins, and trusted each other with anything and everything. They were each others’ rocks, and Raven says with utmost certainty that there is no one in her life, no one at all, more precious to her than Finn. Bellamy’s heart aches at that, aches at the thought that this tough, bright girl had given her love to someone so utterly undeserving. He respects her for her strength, though, in everything. Anyone who could survive all that Raven had and come out of it bright-eyed and full of fire is a force to be reckoned with, and there was no denying that, in choosing to kick Finn to the curb, she was making an incredibly difficult decision that most people as in love as she was would never even consider. But, as she tells him, she’s more than just Finn’s girl, and if he can’t be good to her, he won’t be anything to her.

Bellamy finds something terribly familiar in Raven and Finn’s story, an element of us-ness he recognizes intimately from his friendship with Clarke. If he hadn’t already known, the conversation with Raven could have clued him into the fact that he was head-over-heels for his sister’s best friend, but as it is he just feels sick at the mere thought of doing to Clarke what Finn did to Raven. He knows that if he’s ever lucky enough to have Clarke, really have her, the way he’s longed to for years, he’s never letting her go, not for anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, okay, as of me posting this chapter I have FINISHED writing the entire fic, which is awesome, because I got another idea I'm antsing to write and I know if I started that one before finishing this one, Blue Skies never would have gotten done! I have been thrilled by the response to this, honestly, and thank you to my commenters, and thank you to everyone who left kudos! This has been by far the most well-received thing I've posted and oh my word I've been over the moon about it so THANK YOU GUYS so much!


	3. Chapter 3

Octavia calls a couple of hours into their drive to Ark City.

“What happened, Bellamy? Is everything okay? Is Clarke okay? Are you okay? Do I need to come home? I’m coming home. Lincoln, I’m sorry, your family is delightful, but I need to go ho-”

“Octavia,” Bellamy interrupts. “Breathe. Are you breathing? Okay, well, Clarke’s gone missing. She disappeared this morning, but I’m on her tail. She’s on a bus to Ark City right now and I’m right behind her. I’m gonna find her, okay? You don’t need to come home, you don’t need to worry. I just wanted you to be in the loop, but there is absolutely no reason for you to be worried, all right?”

Octavia’s voice is shaky when she replies, “You know how ridiculous that is, right? My best friend in the world is missing and you want me to not worry?” She laughs, but it’s a terse, humorless laugh. “But I trust you, Bell. If anyone can find her, it’s you.”

“Thanks, O. I gotta drive. Be safe, have fun, tell Lincoln I said hi.”

“Be safe, Bell. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

He hangs up, and Raven asks, “Who was that? Girlfriend?”

He snorts. “No way. Little sister. She’s Clarke’s best friend, and she’s in Hawaii with her boyfriend right now, and as much as I know she’s going to be stressed out of her mind until we find Clarke, it would be so much worse not to tell her. She would be pissed beyond all imagining.”

“I dunno, she sounded pretty calm.”

Bellamy shrugs. “That’s cause she trusts me. I’ve always found Clarke.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s run away before. Three or four times, actually. Her mother’s really, really high pressure, and it just got to her sometimes. At some point she just started coming to our house when Abby, her mom, got to be too much, but a couple of times she actually ran away and we all freaked out looking for her. There was this old couple, though, with grown kids, and they still had the tree house in their backyard. That was where she always went, I always found her there. Never told a soul where her hiding place was, it was always just for us. The first time she took off she was seven years old and decided she was off on a grand adventure, and everyone was freaking out, but I kind of knew she’d just hopped the fence into the yard with the tree house. Everyone was combing the woods for about an hour until we got home, it took some talking to get her to come down.”

“How did you do it?” Raven asks, intrigued.

Bellamy can’t help the grin that breaks across his face. “I basically told her every hero needs companions, and she couldn’t take off on an adventure without me and Octavia because we were basically the three musketeers, and leaving us behind would not only be unforgivable, but also she would probably die without our help. The whole situation was very grave to us.”

Raven smiles over at him. “So did you guys ever go on that great adventure?”

Bellamy beams in a moment of remembered pride. “I had promised her we would, and I was determined to deliver, so that summer she and Octavia got shipped off to her grandparents’ for a couple of days while me and all the parents set up this epic obstacle-course adventure with like cardboard monsters and hopscotch mazes. It was wild. Her mom hid in my attic, we had to rescue her from the clutches of the evil overlord, aka her dad, and she and Octavia and I had to fight our way from Clarke’s room out of her house, down the street to my house, and up to the attic with nerf guns to save the queen from the tower, it was a blast.”

“It sounds like it,” Raven says with a wry smile. “You sound like a good brother.”

The corner of Bellamy’s mouth twists up. “Clarke’s not actually my sister, but yeah. For her and Octavia, I’d do anything. Move mountains and shit. Honestly, they’re all I have, taking care of them is just what I do.”

The darker girl nods sagely. “That’s why you’re going crazy driving all over God’s green earth trying to find her.”

Bellamy looks guilty and says, “Well, yeah. But that’s not the whole reason.”

“Then why else?”

He takes a deep breath, and Raven can see the pain in his eyes clear as the daylight outside the car. “Cause this time it’s my fault she’s gone.”

* * *

The night before she left, Clarke had been at Jasper and Monty’s when they called Bellamy to come pick her up. Jasper and Monty liked to brew their own alcohol, and he could hear the strength of it in their voices over the phone as they told him that Clarke, the biggest goddamn lightweight in Virginia, had had wa-a-a-ay too much, and was going to need to be looked after, or she’d probably pass out then choke to death on her own vomit. And, of course, the two of them were far too inebriated to be looking after anyone. Bellamy had sighed long-sufferingly, then driven over to Jasper and Monty’s to give them a very stern lecture on remembering the fact that Clarke cannot hold her liquor to save her life and they need to either not give her their 150-proof moonshine or _dilute_  it, dammit. After he’d finished yelling at them, he went to retrieve Clarke from the kitchen, pulling her arm gently over his shoulders and helping her to her feet, murmuring quiet, gentle reassurances the whole time. She made it about three steps before her legs gave out and she collapsed into a fit of giggles. With a sigh and a roll of the eyes that, for anyone else, would have been exasperated, but for Clarke was affectionate, Bellamy swung her up into his arms bridal-style and carried her out of the apartment, advising the boys on his way out to put away the moonshine before they ended up totally sloshed too (because he was _not_ going to be helping them nurse their hangovers in the morning).

The drive back to Bellamy’s house was filled with the sound of Clarke trying to drunkenly tell him a bunch of jokes she’d found on the internet, but she kept messing up the punchlines and forgetting important parts. He laughed, but just because she was so ridiculous, and she was a _very_ happy drunk, and the bubbliness was honestly kind of cute. He knew she was going to be in misery in the morning, but for now, the Clarke laughing hysterically at her own slurred jokes was a Clarke he liked being around, especially after the grief and crying and quiet, all-consuming sadness of the past few months. He helped her out of the car and she promptly puked all over the lawn, then again in the downstairs toilet, then again in Octavia’s sink. He gave her water and helped her rinse out her mouth, as he had done for her and his sister every time they’d come home trashed before, then after the taste of puke was hopefully gone, he tucked her into bed with a wastebin by her side in case she should lose her stomach again.

Up through that moment, it was a completely unremarkable night. Clarke didn’t get so hammered often, but when she did he was there to be her ride home and to hold her hair back while she watered his grass with her dinner. He’d done the same for Octavia a few times, but she was made of stronger stuff than Clarke alcohol-wise and only rarely needed him for a ride home. Usually, it was Octavia calling on Clarke’s behalf, and the acceptably-drunk Octavia would help him support the absolutely soused Clarke on the walk (stagger) to the car. There had been nothing that night to make it stick out in his mind, until she called out to him as he walked out.

“Bell’my?” she slurred. “Don’ go yet.”

He turned back and sat on the bed next to her. “What’s up, princess?”

She pushed herself up into a sitting position and scooted over, patting the bed next to her. “Sit up here w’me.” He obliged, swinging his legs up onto the bed and settling back against the headboard. She rested her head on his shoulder with a sigh and he wiggled his toes, making her laugh a little. “Bell, why’s the world hate me?”

“The world doesn’t hate you, Clarke.”

“Dad died. Wells died. Finn… did. The thing. Cheating. ‘M I ‘llowed to be mad about that? Tech-in… technil… tilnechinlanly-” she broke off giggling for a second, then sobered back up. “I was the m’stress. ‘S th’other woman… can I be mad?”

Bellamy slung an arm around her shoulders and hugged her into his side. “Finn lied to you, betrayed you, deceived you. It doesn’t matter if you came first or Raven did, you can and probably should be hurt and mad about it.”

She sighed. “Well, actually. Finn always came first. Sometimes I didn’t at all. He wasn’t very good with his hands or-”

Bellamy covered her mouth with his hand, blushing. “I don’t need to know about your and Finn’s sex life, princess.”

She laughed and licked his palm to make him remove his hand, and he wiped it on his jeans with a noise of disgust. For a while, she was quiet, her breathing steady as she sat snuggled into him, and he thought she was asleep until she spoke again. “Bellamy?” He hummed acknowledgment. “What am I to you?”

“A pain in my ass,” he replied immediately, lightheartedly, a grin on his face.

She poked him in the side. “I’m being serious, Bellamy.”

“Fine, fine.” He sighed and pressed his cheek against the top of her head. “You’re my… my Clarke. That’s the only word for it.”

“Do you care about me?”

He pulled back and looked at her with surprise and concern. “Of course I do. Did you think I don’t?”

She was very quiet as she replied, “Sometimes I don’t think anyone does. Not really.”

He wrapped his arms around her tightly. “Why would you think that?”

She took a deep breath, gearing up to slur and stumble her way through a speech. “All my mom ever wants from me is perfection. It’s all about appearances- as long as I seem like the perfect daughter, she doesn’t give a crap what’s going on underneath. Dad is gone. Wells is gone. Finn obviously never gave a good goddamn about me, or he wouldn’t have started dating me while he was with Raven. Sometimes when Octavia and I are fighting I feel like maybe we’re not as good of friends as we think we are, and I know that if me and her ever really friend-dumped each other she’d get you in the divorce and I’d be all alone, you know?”

Bellamy sighed, playing with a lock of her hair. “Your mom cares about you in her own way, she just doesn’t know how to show it in a way that you can see. That’s not to say you’re wrong in feeling like she doesn’t care, because she should be trying harder, especially now that your dad is gone. Finn is absolutely the most irrelevant hunk of pond scum on the face of the earth, and, honestly? I’m glad he’s out of the picture, because he was never good enough for you. Your friendship with Octavia is unbreakable- I think if you and me were trapped in a fire, she might actually have to think about who to save. She’d save me, of course, because I’m way more fun and charming and better looking, and you’re just a short grumpy lightweight who works herself way too hard.” She swatted him on the chest and he chuckled. “And you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll always care about you, princess. On the unlikely chance you and O ever do get a friend-vorce, you can have joint custody. Every other weekend. Deal?”

“Deal.” There was another pause. “Bellamy, do you love me?”

He rolled his eyes. “Princess, I literally _just_ said-”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

“Then what?”

“Do you _love_ me?”

“I don’t understand-”

In that moment, she swung her leg over him and pulled him down into a kiss.

Bellamy would be lying, horribly, if he ever said he hadn’t imagined kissing Clarke. Years of friendly-slash-siblingish forehead- and cheek-kisses had given him some familiarity with at least the fleeting feeling of her lips- soft and warm, like a flower tickling your skin lying in the grass on a sunny spring day. But nothing, no sisterly peck, no fantasy, could have prepared him for the feeling of that kiss. It was like drinking sunlight, warmth spreading through him from his lips all the way down to his toes. She tasted a little bit of vomit and moonshine, but mostly she tasted like herself- something sweet, something like strawberries, and something unmistakably Clarke. For a couple of seconds he was surprised, frozen, then his mind caught up, and even though his instincts were telling him to tangle one hand in her hair and splay the other across her back, pull her closer and close his eyes and lose himself in the entire universe contained in this one lovely, incredible girl, he knew better. She was so drunk and as much as he wanted her to choose him, he wanted her to make the choice in her right mind, and he wanted her to remember it. This was wrong. So he took her gently by the shoulders and pushed her back.

“Don’t do this now, princess,” he said hoarsely. Her eyes fluttered open and met his. For a moment they lay there, suspended in the feeling, until everything came crashing down. Her eyes filled with hurt and he felt his heart tear as she pushed herself, roughly, away from him, wrestling her way out of Octavia’s bed. He stood and tried to catch her as she stumbled towards the door, but she tore herself out of his grasp and stormed unsteadily from the room. “Clarke, wait.”

“No,” she snapped, suddenly approaching sober. “I get it. I’m sorry. I’ll leave.”

“You can barely walk.”

“I’ll be fine.” She struggled with the knob on the front door for a moment before managing to open it.

“Princess-”

“ _Don’t_ call me that.” The pain in her voice was like a tsunami, washing over him with a heavy darkness that took his breath away. She didn’t even look at him as she slammed the door.

For a moment, he just stood there, trying to decide whether he should go after her. (Now that she’s missing, he’s cursing himself with every fiber of his being that he let her walk away). He moved to the window and waited until she had passed his next door neighbors’ driveway before he walked outside and watched her stagger down the street to her house, then disappear inside. He stood there after she was out of sight and watched the light in her bedroom window turn on, then back off. He must have stood there for ten minutes staring at her dark house before he finally turned and went back in to lay in his bed and toss and turn, sleepless, until the wee hours of the morning, when he drifted off for a moment, only to be woken by Abby’s call and the news that Clarke had gone.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! (And thanks to all the awesome people who left comments, you guys are the highlight of my day all the time)


	4. Chapter 4

After he tells the story, there’s a long silence in the car.

“You fucked up,” Raven says at last.

He grits his teeth and glares at the road. “Believe me, Raven, I know. I have spent this whole day feeling worried and guilty and _sick_ , and believe me, if I knew how to fix it I would.”

“Hey.” Raven elbows him companionably and he looks down at her. “She’ll forgive you. If Clarke and I are anything alike- and I think we are, since Finn kind of has a type- then enough groveling and explaining and declaration of undying love might possibly make her consider forgiving you.”

He laughs bitterly and shakes his head. “No way. No declarations of any kind of love.”

“Why not? I mean, you do love her, right? You obviously do. I can see it. It’s so obvious it’s a little disgusting.” She makes a face to highlight her point.

He shrugs. “She’s too good for me.”

Raven rolls her eyes. “Well, duh. Of course she is. What does that matter?”

He shakes his head. “You don’t get it, Raven. She’s going into one of the best pre-med programs in the country. She’s so smart, and she works so hard, and she’s going to have such an incredible, successful life, and there’s no room in her future for a bad-tempered blue-collar asshole who barely graduated high school. Do you know what I do for a living, Raven? I’m a fucking museum security guard. I clean an office building. I’ve had the same job since I was eighteen. I’m nothing, and she’s gonna be everything.”

Raven sits up sharply and glares at him. “Is there something wrong with being blue-collar? You think just because you didn’t need a degree to get your job you’re inferior? Doctors work with their hands, too, you know, just like us. Just like janitors. Just like mechanics. They’re not any _better_  than you or me just because they spent a fuckton of money to get the education and license to work with their hands.” She sits back and continues, less angrily, “Besides, you think your job defines you? You’re wrong, Bellamy. I’m not just a mechanic. You’re not just a security guard or janitor or whatever. Who we are and what we do to make a living are two very different things. You know what happens to people who let their jobs define them? They get obsessed. They get so pulled into what they’re doing that they forget who they are when they leave the goddamn office. They stop leaving the goddamn office. They become washed up and dull and lifeless. Do you want that for yourself, Bellamy? No, you don’t. You’re, what, twenty-something? Don’t write yourself off. Don’t act like your life is over. Don’t become a goddamn office zombie. Carpe diem, get the girl, live your life so you’ve got something to offer your kids and your grandkids when you’re old and crotchety and you can’t work anymore, because they’ll forget how many zeroes are in the check you leave them after you die, but they won’t forget what you tell them before you go.” She sighs and shrugs, settling back into her seat, staring out the window, tirade over. “But, hey, if you wanna let Clarke go and just be that guy she loved when she was a kid, it’s your choice.”

* * *

Ark City has always been a familiar place. Clarke and Octavia and Wells used to go there all the time to visit Wells’s dad, who was the mayor there. Wells and his father had a strange relationship (“I respect and admire you as a man but don’t know how to treat you as my dad”) since Wells lived with his mother, but then she died and his father moved to her house in their small town to look after him, and they became incredibly close. Before they met Wells, though, Bellamy used to take Clarke and Octavia there for a day in the city every few months. The history museums were Bellamy’s favorite, the art museums were Clarke’s favorite, and Octavia loved the parks and the old military forts.

When Bellamy was about thirteen or fourteen, he and Clarke went to the city by themselves. Octavia was sick, so she stayed home, and the two spent most of the bus ride squabbling about where they would go. They managed to hammer out, through much heated discussion, a plan that would allow more or less equal time in both the museum of world history and the museum of modern art, and the history museum was up first. It was an incredibly busy day, seeing as how it was the middle of summer and the height of tourist season, Bellamy looked away from Clarke for a minute to read some street art, and when he turned back, she was gone, swept away by the crowd. Half an hour of desperate, shouted searching later, he found her perched on the low wall around a park, crying quietly. Her tears dried immediately when he ran up and hugged her, and she was trying really hard to be angry at his having lost her, even though she was mostly just grateful she’d been found. He apologized over and over, and they spent the whole day in the museum of modern art, without argument.

* * *

They arrive at the bus station before the bus does, and Bellamy waits anxiously, watching the road for the familiar ancient behemoth of a vehicle to come choking and sighing down the road into the station. The minute it does, he bolts aboard, scanning the seats for her familiar blonde hair and feeling his soul deflate further with the disappointment he expected. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been Clarke if it was that easy. He turns to the bus driver and provides the same hurried description of Clarke he’s been giving all day, only to be told that she got off at a small town a few stops ago. He sighs and turns to get back off the bus, when a voice stops him.

“Hey, sir? You’re looking for that sad blonde girl? Cause she left this behind, I figure it’s important since it’s in an envelope and all.” She holds out a large envelope with WELLS written on it in bold marker. He takes it with a nod and thanks her, returning to his car and fighting the urge to scream when he flops back into the driver’s seat. He scrubs his hands over his face and sighs loudly.

Raven has already taken the envelope from his hands and opened it up. There’s two stencils inside, the kind that you spray paint over, that read “WELLS WAS HERE” and “PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD.” There’s also a note written on lined paper, and Raven opens it up to read aloud.

“Dear Bellamy,” it begins. “I know if anyone is reading this, it’s you, because if anyone is looking for me, it’s you. If you’re looking for me, you should know that I’m safe and I’ll be okay and I’m sorry. You should also know that I’m on a mission right now, and I need to do this, for reasons, and I need your help with it.

“Wells died young, way too young, and it’s not fair. I know you never loved him, not like me and O did, not like you love us. But I know that you loved him in that weird secondhand way that you love everyone who’s important to me and O, so I know you agree with me when I say that it’s not fucking fair what happened to him and there will never be enough justice to make it right. I don’t know if you knew this about Wells, but he was going to be president one day. He never said it out loud, he always just said he was going into politics, but we knew. We knew if there was anyone who’d become the youngest, cutest, awkwardest president in history, it was gonna be Wells. We knew that if there was ever gonna be another American golden age, it was going to be because Wells made it happen. Wells was going to make such a mark on the world, and he never got to. And it’s just not fair, it’s not fucking fair.

“Your mission today is to make the mark that Wells can’t anymore. I’ve included everything you need, just go get some spray paint and start tagging. There’s another sheet with a list of places his mark needs to be. I know you’ll do this for me, Bellamy. I trust you.

“Love,” Raven finishes, “Clarke.” She looks down at the stencils and then over at Bellamy. “You know, Blake,” she says, “you sure are lucky you picked me up to help you out, because having an experienced vandal on hand is going to make this go so much faster.”

He grins at her and she smiles back and the engine turns over and they peel out of the parking lot towards a hardware store.

* * *

For the rest of the afternoon they sneak around tagging walls with Wells’s mark. Raven teaches him how to be a lookout, and they switch off spray-painting. Four times they almost get caught, and just manage to run away and escape arrest in the surging crowds of Ark City.

After the last wall has been tagged, they slam shut the doors to Bellamy’s car and collapse back in their seats, breathless with exhilaration and laughter. After a moment of staring at the ceiling of the Ford and grinning like madmen, Bellamy reaches out and high-fives Raven.

“I don’t know when I last had this much fun with someone other than Clarke or my sister. Is that sad?”

“Yep,” Raven replies, popping the P. “Where to next? The town Clarke got off at?”

Bellamy pauses and considers before replying, “Actually, no. Not yet.”

She looks over at him in confusion, her dark brows furrowed. “Why not?”

He turns the car on and pulls out of the lot they left it in all day while they were tagging buildings. “Because there’s one more place Wells should have left a mark, and Clarke didn’t put it on the list.”

* * *

In the middle of the park outside City Hall, there’s a statue of Richard Henry Lee. Nobody can say for sure why that man, or why there, but it is. Most people don’t actually know who it is, but it’s Virginia, and the place is chock full of historical statues, so nobody really stresses over it if they’re ignorant of which dead white guy it is immortalized in bronze in the middle of the park. Thelonius Jaha, however, always found inspiration in the statue, and it was an inspiration he passed on to his son.

Bellamy had accompanied Octavia and Clarke and Wells to Ark City once, and in the middle of their day, he’d been confused to be dragged by the three younger teens to this park and this statue. Octavia and Clarke had explained that it was just a thing, that they always did it when they were in the city. They went to the park and Bellamy and the girls sat on a bench while Wells stood in front of the statue and stared up at Richard Henry Lee’s formidable height. The boy spent a good two minutes gazing in reverence at the statue, and if he didn’t know better Bellamy would have sworn he was praying to it.

Later, Bellamy just had to ask Wells about it. The boy explained that Richard Henry Lee had been the statesman who had motioned at the second continental congress for the colonies to declare independence. He hadn’t written the declaration, and he was forgotten from almost every history textbook there was, but he had been the one who’d gotten the ball rolling. Wells explained that his father had always been inspired by this story, that it didn’t matter whether your name got etched on the brain of every student for a thousand years, you could still do something important even if nobody remembered it was you. It was a small thing, being the one to say “let’s be independent,” but its results were anything but small.

“Your mark on history,” Wells had told Bellamy, “doesn’t have to be visible to be big. And while being remembered is all well and good, it’s more about what you leave behind you than whether anyone knows it was you who left it behind.”

Bellamy, a history lover himself, had seen the wisdom in this, and it was one of the moments he felt genuinely fond of Wells.

* * *

It is to this statue of Richard Henry Lee that Bellamy and Raven go in the fading light of day. The park is mostly empty except for a few strolling couples, but the pair put on hoods anyway and act incredibly sneaky. Neither of them is lookout, and Raven swiftly tapes up the stencils and paints in Wells’s mark while Bellamy sloppily freehands “YOU LEFT YOUR MARK” above it. They finish without incident, something that is vaguely disappointing to both of them. It feels as though, since this is the most important mark, this is the one that they should leave with a bang, running from shouting police and leaping over fences and into alleyways to escape.

Like so many decisive moments in life, though, it comes and goes quietly, marked in memory not by the feeling of experiencing it, but the significance. As Bellamy walks away, he can feel this moment being etched into his life story, the weight of their grief and bitterness about the injustice of it all, the weight of the blank spaces in Clarke and Octavia’s friendship that Wells used to fill, the weight of knowing that the world lost someone spectacular in him, the weight of everything pushing down on the chisel hard so that he knows he will always remember leaving Wells Jaha’s mark for all the world to see. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha ok so I definitely maybe cried writing this?  
> Anyway thanks so much, again, to everyone who commented, you've no idea how much it makes my day to see what you guys have to say! And thanks again to everyone for reading it!


	5. Chapter 5

It is past dark and the bus station is about to close when Bellamy and Raven run in. At some point during the past hours, she became just as invested in this journey as him, and now she follows him into the station to ask after Clarke. Both of them are hoping with a small part of them that they will find her here, that Finn and Wells will have been enough, but at the same time they know that she will be gone already. A cursory glance around the small station confirms their knowledge, and they turn to the ticket booth.

“Ma’am,” Raven begins, “were you here this morning when the bus for Ark City pulled in?” The lady grunts affirmatively. “Did you see a blonde girl, eighteen, this tall, get off?”

“You looking for her?” Both nod. “One of you Bellamy Blake?” Bellamy points to himself. The ticket lady shoves a key unceremoniously across the counter and rasps, “Locker 47.” As soon as Bellamy takes the key, the lady pulls down the metal shutters on her desk, almost taking his fingers off with them.

“Nice lady,” he mutters under his breath.

“No kidding.”

They walk over to the lockers and open up number 47 to find another envelope, similar to the first, but with FINN written on it in marker. Raven’s eyebrows quirk but Bellamy opens it this time, pulling out the note first.

“Dear Bellamy,” it begins, just as the other. “If you’re reading this, it means you’re looking, and hopefully you’ve done what I asked for Wells. If I’m being honest with you, your leaving the marks in Ark wasn’t as important as what I was doing. Call Thelonius and tell him to visit his son’s grave, sit against the tree and watch the sunrise. Wells always loved sunrise best. I think Thelonius knew that. I hope he did. I hope he knew his son.

“If you followed me from the beginning, you’ll know I righted a Finn-related wrong already, but the thing is, I wasn’t fixing what Finn did to me, I was trying to fix, as best I could, what he did to Raven. You should get to know her. I think we’re very similar, so you’d like her.” Bellamy grins at Raven. “I buried the love notes, symbolically, and I’ve got all the jewelry and shit stashed someplace safe to give to her later. She deserves it more than me. I feel like everything he gave me is hers and I stole it, and I hate that feeling.

“I’ve done what I can to fix what I inadvertently did to Raven, but now it’s payback time for Finn. I had to wait until I knew you were on board for this one, because I knew you’d want to do this just as much as I want it done, because I know if there’s anyone in this world who wants to put Finn Collins through hell as much as I do, it’s you, Bell. So here’s what I need from you: I need Finn out of his apartment by midnight. I know it’s not a lot of time, but I trust that between you and Raven you’ll come up with something. Leave the rest up to me.

“I’m sorry, again, for everything. I wouldn’t be doing all this if I didn’t need it. Trust me, okay? I’ll see you soon. With love, Clarke.” He folds the note and looks to Raven. “So how are we going to do this?”

* * *

The plan they agree upon is simple: Raven will lure Finn over to her place, and from there they can lock him in her closet. She makes the call as soon as they’re back at her apartment, and he answers on the second ring.

“Hello?” he says, and Bellamy grinds his teeth at the breathless hope in his voice.

“It’s me, babe. I need you to come over, we have to talk.” The pain in her voice is convincing, and Bellamy isn’t sure whether it’s a real agony she’s been hiding all day, or she’s just a really good actress.

“You’re giving me another chance?” the jerk sounds about ready to cry with joy.

“I-I don’t know, Finn,” Raven says, sounding hesitant and hurt. Bellamy decides her feelings are real and suddenly feels both sympathy and wild admiration for her pure strength in sticking out an entire day of hurting so deep. “Maybe. I don’t know. Please just come over.” Her voice cracks on the last sentence and Bellamy sees her swiftly brush away a tear.

“I’m on my way.” Finn hangs up with a click.

Raven’s face transforms to a wicked grin. “I hope whatever Clarke has planned for him is awesomely terrible.”

“Me too.”

Ten minutes later, Finn knocks on the door, and, as soon as he walks in, is taken down by Bellamy, his wrists bound together with duct tape. Raven shuts and locks the door, then helps Bellamy tie the struggling cheater’s ankles as well, before they drag him to the hall closet and lock him inside.

“Why are you doing this?” he growls, tugging at his tape-cuffs. Bellamy smirks down at him and shuts the door. He sits back against it, his head thunking softly on the wood.

After a few minutes he says, loud enough for the hogtied Finn to hear, “Why did you cheat on Raven?”

“What?”

“You heard me, Collins. I’ve spent like all day with Raven. She’s awesome. Why would you cheat on her?” Bellamy tugs at a loose string on the hem of his jeans. “And while I absolutely get why it would be with Clarke, because she is probably the most incredible person on the face of the earth, I don’t understand why you would throw away what you have with Raven.”

There’s a long pause before Finn responds. “Because I always knew I was going to end   
up with Raven. It was dull. I love her, but it was the thing that was just going to happen no matter what, there was no excitement. I wanted something less certain, and Clarke is unpredictable. It’s like the difference between going into the family business that your father and your father’s father and your father’s father’s father have all run, and striking out on your own. Sure, Raven is familiar and I love her more than anything, but Clarke was exciting.”

It takes Bellamy a long moment of digging his nails into his palm to get himself back under control. “So you’re saying,” he finally chokes out through gritted teeth, “that you just _used_ Clarke for the fact that she wasn’t guaranteed to you by some stupid girl-next-door expectation?” He shakes his head. “You’re something, you know that? You’re a real piece of work. Let me tell you something, Finn, you don’t love Raven, not really. You just think you do cause it’s what you think is expected of you. Love doesn’t get bored and go chasing after high school girls. Love doesn’t cheat and then not even _regret_ it. Love doesn’t think it’s dull or unexciting. You know what it’s like to actually love someone? It’s like every minute you’re with them is a blessing and you’re so grateful, but still it feels like every minute of the rest of your life won’t be enough time with them. Loving someone is wanting them to be happy no matter what, even if that happiness doesn’t have you in it. Loving someone is putting them before yourself, and loving someone doesn’t get boring. When you love someone you treasure them, and you don’t throw them away because some pretty young girl is _exciting_.” He has to stop talking in order to draw himself back in and contain the emotion awash in his chest. Talking about love makes him think of Clarke, and somehow, putting into words the way he feels about her makes it more overwhelmingly strong. But thinking about her also reminds him how incredibly worried he is. After a long day of single-minded focus- just go here and find out where Clarke’s gotten off to next- he’s finally letting himself feel and process everything he’d been distracting himself from. Suddenly he can hardly breathe for the terror of not knowing where she is, for the regret over letting her leave, for the strength of his love for her. Finally, he finishes his tirade with, “You never loved Raven. I’m not sure you’re even capable of loving anyone.”

Finn is silent, and he stays that way for a while.

* * *

It’s about three in the morning when Raven runs over to where Bellamy’s sitting, practically asleep, against the closet door. She thrusts her phone at his ear and he takes it, blearily grunting out a hello.

“Bellamy?”

Instantly, he’s awake, scrambling to a more alert sitting position. “Clarke? Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I’m fine, Bell. I can’t tell you where I am, but you should get Finn home.” She sounds so tired, and slurred, maybe a little drunk, but at the same time more full of life than she’s been in ages.

“Are you coming home, princess?” his voice is hoarse with worry.

“I’m not done with everything yet, Bellamy. I still have things to do.” She sounds genuinely regretful.

“Is it your dad?” She’s silent, and he takes it as a yes. “Whatever it is, princess, I’ll do it with you, just please come back.”

“I can’t.”

“Please, Clarke. I’m so worried about you.” His voice cracks and he curses himself.

“Bellamy, I have to do this alone, okay? I know you’re worried, but don’t be. I don’t think I could face you after… I’m sorry, okay? I’m so sorry for what I did. I know I screwed things up. I’m giving you space and I promise if you can forgive me it’ll be like nothing ever happened, okay? I’m sorry.” Her voice trails off, too choked with tears to continue.

“No, princess, no. Don’t be sorry. Clarke, I-” but the line is dead. The silence echoes in his ear for a moment and he drops the phone and rests his head on his knees before he whispers, saying it aloud for the first time, “Clarke, I love you.”

* * *

They release Finn and he leaves with an angry huff and a sad, longing, puppy-eyed look at Raven, to which she responds with an unhesitant middle finger.

“Do you think we’ll get arrested?” Bellamy asks.

“Nah,” Raven replies with a grin. “He knows I know where he hides his weed.”

They both laugh briefly before sobering back up.

“So where is she now?” Raven asks after a while.

Bellamy sighs. “I don’t know. She didn’t say anything on the phone, except that the last thing has to do with her dad. That’s all we have, so we should start with his grave I guess.”

“If it’s the last thing,” Raven says carefully, “Do you think maybe we should just let her do it and come home on her own? I mean, she doesn’t seem like the type to just pick up and run off and never look back.”

Bellamy shakes his head. “No. No, we can’t just let her go. I don’t know why, but I just have this gut feeling I need to find her. You don’t have to come along if you don’t want, but I’m going to go ahead and try to find her.”

Raven stands for a moment, considering, and says finally, “I think this is the part you go alone, Bellamy. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved adventuring with you today, but now that it’s between Clarke and her dad, and Finn’s done, it doesn’t involve me anymore.”

“I understand.” He pauses and stares at the wall for a second, calculating like he did when he was trying do decide whether to invite her along on the trip. “You should come hang out with all of us sometime, me and Clarke and O and our friends. Everyone’s pretty cool, way cooler than Finn, and you look like the kind of girl who’d love Jasper and Monty’s homemade moonshine.”

“Homemade moonshine?” She quirks a brow.

He grins. “It’s been used to strip paint and make people give up both their secrets and their dinner. Strong stuff, but good.”

She punches him lightly on the arm. “I might just take you up on that one, Blake. Take care, okay? Good luck.”

“Thanks, Raven.”

* * *

Bellamy can’t help the feeling of deja vu as he trudges up the hill towards Jake Griffin’s grave. It’s been months, but the man’s death still feels like a fresh stab wound, probably because it was so unexpected, and the aftershocks still haven’t ceased. Bellamy isn’t sure it’ll ever stop being painful, especially since the tragedy destroyed Abby and Clarke’s relationship irreparably.

Jake Griffin was a prominent engineer, leader in his field, genius and incredible scientist and all-around amazing. As a father he was without parallel, beloved not only by his own daughter, but also by the two kids he took under his wing. It was Jake who taught Bellamy all the stereotypical things he needed to know about being a man- shaving and tying a tie, but also the important lessons about being respectful, and about always taking pride in your work. It was Jake Griffin who taught Bellamy that men cry, too, and that’s okay. It was Jake Griffin who showed Bellamy what strength means, that it’s more than just muscles, and that his strength should never be used to hurt. Bellamy became a good person by virtue of his mother, but it was Jake Griffin who helped him become a good man.

So when a workplace accident put Jake in a vegetative state, Bellamy felt it almost as acutely as Clarke and Abby. He could only imagine the pain Clarke was in, however, when Abby turned off life support while Clarke was at school, killing her father without giving her a chance to say goodbye. Bellamy isn’t sure Clarke will ever forgive her mother for that, and if she never does, he won’t blame her.

As he approaches the grave, though, he feels the heaviness of his grief lift in favor of rising terror. When he realizes that, yes, that’s smoke, and a slight body lying prone on the ground, his heart rate kicks into overdrive and he sprints the remaining distance. Skidding to his knees, he finds Clarke lying unconscious next to a half-empty bottle of moonshine and the ashes of what looks like a watch, its face cracked and charred, her jacket having caught fire and the flames beginning to smolder their way up her sleeve.

He rips the jacket off her and quickly smothers the fire, then returns his attention to her, shaking her and tapping her cheeks and screaming her name, trying to wake her. He feels for her pulse and it’s slow, dangerously slow, terrifyingly slow, and he feels his rise in panicked response, like he can somehow make up for it. No matter what he does, though, she won’t open her eyes, and he’s breathless, practically sobbing with fear as he calls 911.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so the next chapter is the end but I'm having some serious love-hate with it so it's entirely possible that it might take me like a week to actually work through the whole thing  
> as always THANK YOU to everyone who read and extra thank you to everyone who commented!


	6. Chapter 6

Bellamy paces.

He tugs at his hair and rubs his face and wrings his hand and he paces back and forth and back and forth and he can feel the pitying eyes of the night shift desk nurse but goddammit he doesn’t care. All he cares about is Clarke. The minutes pass in molasses agony, every second its own horrible eternity, and it’s all the worse for the double-time racing of his mind and beating of his heart. Bellamy Blake isn’t a praying man, but he sends pleas into the ether anyway, just for lack of anything more concrete to try swaying the balance of fate towards Clarke being all right.

 _If she makes it out okay_ …, begin a hundred non-prayers.

He’ll go vegan.

He’ll volunteer in all his free time.

He’ll never say another angry word.

He’ll stop wanting her.

Above all else over and over he begs _just please whoever’s listening please I won’t ask for more I won’t ask for anything more than her just to be alive just to be okay I don’t care if I can’t ever have her I don’t care if she never speaks to me again I don’t care I just want her to be okay please please please_.

Finally he sits down heavily, head in his hands, teeth clenched against either sobbing or heaving, he isn’t quite sure which. It seems like he’s sitting there forever, just breathing as deeply as he can manage, when at last a pair of hideous rubber shoes appears in front of him.

“How is she?” he croaks, slowly lifting his head.

“She’s going to be fine. Her blood alcohol content was point-three-two,” the nurse begins, and continues in a brief summary of her condition, but Bellamy is still stuck on ‘she’s going to be fine.’ He feels like he could cry with relief, and it takes him too long to notice that the nurse is turning and leading him into the ward. He hurries after her, down the hall and around a couple of corners and into a small sterile room with two beds tucked behind blue paper curtains like game show prizes. The nurse pulls aside a curtain and there’s Clarke, and it twists him up to see her like that, pale and small against the pillows with a needle dripping fluids into her arm and a bandage around her wrist where the jacket had burned her. There’s a chair next to her bed and he pulls it up close and sits down. He rests his chin on the bed railing and reaches for her hand and settles in there, curled over her bed like an exhausted guardian angel, one hand holding hers and the other playing with her hair and gently stroking her face.

She’s so precious to him and he’s so grateful he can hardly breathe.

* * *

There was a time, right after Bellamy’s mother died, when he was just numb. Octavia was overwhelmed with grief, consumed by it, barely made it out of bed some days, had to come home from school early half the time (to an empty house, which almost made it worse in Bellamy’s opinion). He, meanwhile, was a robot. He woke up and went through the motions of every day and barely spoke and reacted only minimally to his life. Everything was on autopilot, and he honestly doesn’t remember much of those days. They were just a blur of grief and confusion and absolute terror at the sudden responsibility, and if it weren’t for Clarke and Octavia, he’s not entirely sure he ever would have broken out of that hideous fugue.

It was a day about a month after she had died that she found him on the couch staring at a tv he didn’t notice was blank, staring into space. She sat down next to him, and he reflexively lifted his arm to let her cuddle into his side as she had so many times in their long history. It was a moment before he seemed to come to himself and look down to see her, staring up at him with wide blue eyes that, even then, made his heart clench in equal parts familiar fondness and sharp yearning. Usually those eyes contained spirit and fire, but today they were soft, sad, beseeching. For a long moment they just stared at each other, before she finally looked down at her hands clenched in her lap and said, “O told me you probably needed me.”

“Did she?” His voice sounded dull and distant, even to him.

Clarke shrugged, the motion pressing her closer into him. “She said if she tried to talk to you you’d just put on that ridiculous bravado you’ve been faking for her sake. She’s not dumb, you know, she knows you’re hurting, too. You don’t have to pretend to be invincible.”

“Yes I do, princess. I have to be strong, every second, for Octavia. She needs me to be here, to be the adult. I have to look after her, I can’t afford to fall apart.” He could hardly talk around the ever-present lump in his throat, and it was a fight to keep his voice steady. “If I fall apart, I won’t be able to put myself back together.”

She reached up and took his face in her hands. “You don’t have to, Bellamy. Don’t you see? You’re not alone. You can let other people help you. You’re never alone.”

With that, he felt something deep inside him, some stubborn devotion to the idea of stoic strength, fall to pieces, and he crumpled onto Clarke’s shoulder, his arms coming around her and clinging to her like he was about to be swept out to sea. He broke into loud, ugly sobs, and her hands came up to card through his hair and rub circles gently into his back. She didn’t try to hush or comfort him, just let him weep and weep until it all finally petered out into hiccupping breaths and shuddering sighs. When even those had died off and evened out, he finally lifted his head from her shoulder and gave her a small, watery smile, which she answered her own.

“Don’t be afraid to ask for help, Bell.” She kissed his forehead and stood, pulling him gently to his feet by both hands. “I’m gonna go cook dinner, you should go wash your face, okay?” He nodded and she offered him another little smile before squeezing his hands and heading off for the kitchen. He stared after her for a long moment, even once the door had closed behind her, and for the first time since it’d started, he didn’t try to fight off or tamp down the wave of affection that filled his heart to bursting.

For the first time since his mother had died, he thought that maybe it wasn’t the end of the world, and he knew with certainty that things, however difficult, would be better.

* * *

Bellamy doesn’t realize he’s asleep until he wakes at the feeling of Clarke pulling her hand from his. He jolts up and beams at her. “Morning, princess. How do you feel?”

“Water,” she rasps. He offers her the cup of half-melted ice chips the nurse had left. Not meeting his eyes, she takes a drink and crunches on the ice and finally asks, “What happened?”

“You were burning something on your dad’s grave and you’d drunk too much of Jasper and Monty’s death-in-a-bottle and you collapsed and I got there just as your jacket caught fire. Brought you to the hospital, they pumped your stomach and about twelve hours later, here we are.”

“Oh.” She still won’t look at him and he feels worry start to settle in his gut. “Have you called my mom yet?”

“Yeah, she was at work, though, said to call her when you woke up.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Are you sure? I know she-”

“You should go home too,” she says dully, completely ignoring him.

“How will you get home?”

She shrugs absently. She still hasn’t looked at him. “I’ll call Monty.”

There’s a long pause as Bellamy watches her blank face for any sign of emotion. “Do you want me to leave?”

Her eyes flicker over to him for the first time, then back to the wall in front of her. “Yes.”

He doesn’t move for a long moment, then he slowly stands, and, leaning over to press a hesitant kiss to her hair, makes his way to the door, all the while fighting to stay calm. At the door, though, he stops, and looks back at her, and says, “Clarke, it’s okay to be a little weak.” She won’t look at him still, and he turns and sits back down on her bed. “I don’t understand. I want to understand, and I don’t. Were you _trying_ to kill yourself? Cause you almost did. Do you have any idea what I’ve- what we’ve all been going through? You just disappeared, Clarke. Nobody knew where you were. Octavia was out of her mind with worry, she’d be back here right now if I hadn’t told her to stay in Hawaii. I know you’re hurt and confused and everything is a fucking disaster, but there are much more constructive ways of dealing with it than running away. You’re not alone, Clarke, you have so many people who care about you. Let us help you, princess. For once just let me help you.”

“You’re always helping me,” she says quietly. “I’m sick of feeling helpless- you always make me feel so helpless. ‘Stay at my house, princess! I’ll drive you home from parties at three in the morning, princess! I’ll hold your hair back while you vomit on my lawn, princess!’ You can be such a goddamn- I don’t need you as much as you think I do. I can take care of myself, you know.”

He blinks at her, shocked. “You’re mad because I’m too helpful?”

She shuts her eyes tight. “No, Bellamy- I’m fucking embarrassed, okay? Just go away. I can’t be around you right now.” He turns and leaves.

Sure, maybe he’d promised the powers that be that he’d be okay with her never speaking to him again as long as she was okay. But that didn’t mean it didn’t break his heart.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really sorry for the long wait, you guys- I decided to redo the ending and it's been giving me fits all week. All told it's probably going to end up coming out to seven (or maybe eight, I'm really feeling an epilogue) chapters. Thanks again for reading, and special thanks to everyone who left comments!


	7. Chapter 7

_“Hey princess, it’s me, just checking in to see how you’re doing. I know you probably still don’t want to talk to me but I’m here if you change your mind, okay?”_

_“Me again, princess. Still haven’t heard back from you. Run away again?... Yeah that was weak I’m sorry. Hope you’re doing all right.”_

_“It’s me- just checking in again. Call me back?”_

_“Clarke this is getting ridiculous, it’s been a month.”_

_“You can’t avoid me forever, princess, you practically live at my house now that O’s back. Just talk to me.”_

_“I don’t want to beg, and you don’t want me to beg because the secondhand embarrassment would be unbearable, but I will beg. Fucking talk to me, Clarke, stop being so stubborn.”_

_“Come on, princess. I miss you.”_

 

* * *

 

“God, O,” he groans. “What do I have to do?”

Octavia shrugs. “She’s Clarke. She’ll come around when she comes around, you know you can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do.”

They’re both sprawled across the couch one hazy Saturday in late July, trying desperately to stay cool in the Virginia summer swelter. Bellamy is shirtless and immobile in front of a fan, a book abandoned on the floor next to him, and Octavia is glaring at her phone and fanning herself languidly with a folded-up page of newsprint. “Ugh, Twitter fuckwads don’t know when to shut up,” she grumbles, dropping the fan and tapping furiously at the screen.

“Are they talking shit about Taylor Swift again?” Bellamy drawls, closing his eyes and trying not to think about how sweaty and sticky he feels.

“Yes! It’s- ugh, no stop calling her a whore, stupid boys, your opinion is so irrelevant.”

“Destroy them.”

“I’m already on it.”

Silence reigns, punctuated by Octavia’s occasional angry exclamations at, quote, ‘fucking ignoramus sexist pieces of shit’ on Twitter. Bellamy’s still staring at the ceiling, thoughts of Clarke swirling lazily through his head, trying to work out a way to fix the disaster their friendship has become. As if on cue, there’s the sound of a key turning in the door, and Octavia peeks at Bellamy through her eyelashes to watch the play of emotions across his face- surprise, then pain, then a shuttered blankness that fails to hide the ridiculous kicked-puppy longing in his eyes as he retrieves his book from the floor. She shakes her head slightly, muttering something about him being pathetic, as Clarke walks into the room and Bellamy glares at the page in his hands.

“Hey, O,” she says, “you ready?”

“Ugh, yes.” Octavia hops out of her chair. “We’re going to the movies, later, Bell.”

“Bye, have fun.” His gaze stays trained on the book, fighting the urge to jump up and grab Clarke and kiss her or shake her or do whatever he has to to make her fucking _talk to him_. Then they’re gone and the door is shut behind them and he drops his book onto his face with a groan.

The whole summer passes in the same way, with Bellamy and Clarke seeing each other for a second here or there as she picks up Octavia or he leaves for work, always passing in terse silence, never actually looking at each other. August comes and he helps Octavia pack up to move into the dorm at the university she and Clarke are both going to, full ride, roommates, moving out of home even though home is just a half-hour drive away. He grumbles and grouches but he’s happy to see his little sister growing up, as sad as it is for him to let her go.

On move-in morning, after everything has been dragged up to Octavia’s room and he’s heading out to let her unpack and settle in on her own, Bellamy asks, “Hey, how’s Clarke getting her stuff up here?”

Octavia shrugs. “She’s probably doing it herself. She’s on an independence kick right now, doesn’t want anyone helping her with anything.”

Bellamy frowns. The plan had originally been that they’d drive up at the same time and just move both girls in together, but that was before all of the drama, before Clarke became an island on her own away from the Blake family. He misses her, immensely. It’s been so long since Clarke hasn’t been part of his life that he can barely even remember it, and he doesn’t really know what to do now that she’s excised herself from him.

He bids his goodbyes to Octavia and starts down the four flights of stairs. About halfway down, he freezes. Clarke’s there, struggling to carry a cardboard box up a flight of stairs, finally giving up and dropping it on the floor and sinking down next to it, her head in her hands. There’s about a microsecond of debate, and then Bellamy is down to the landing where she is, crouched in front of her, gently prying her hands from her face.

“Let me help you, princess.”

For one breathless heartbeat she just looks at him with wide eyes, and he braces himself for her to push him away or shout at him or, worst of all, pretend he’s not there. Instead, she throws her arms around him and practically tackles him to the ground. For a couple of seconds,

he’s too surprised to move, and then he’s holding her close and burying his nose in the crook of her neck and it feels too perfect to be real.

After a long moment that feels too short, Clarke pulls back and says, “I’m so sorry, Bell. I’m just so sorry for everything.”

He reaches out and plays with a lock of her hair and takes a moment before responding. “I’m not going to say it’s okay, because it’s not. You did some stupid stuff, which was fine except for the part where you decided to worry as many people as possible while you did it, and then the whole silent treatment was kind of shitty of you, honestly. But I forgive you, because even though what you did wasn’t okay, I still love you, and I know you’re not going to do it again because you’re not stupid.”

She hugs him again, quick and tight, and says, “Thank you. I was so ashamed of it all, and the way I reacted- I couldn’t stand to face you cause I thought I’d fucked everything up. I figured if I just never spoke to you again I’d never have to know how much I ruined, and it’d at least be my choice not to have you, rather than you not wanting to be around me, you know?”

He rolls his eyes. “Princess, there’s practically nothing you could do I wouldn’t forgive you for. I’m not going to stop caring about you just because you made bad choices, okay? Just don’t do it again.”

“I won’t.”

“Except the kissing part” He fights a smile. “That was good.”

She blinks at him. “Wait, what?”

“You heard me, princess.” And then he’s kissing her, soft and hesitant and questioning, trying to make sure she wants this too. For a moment she doesn’t respond, and he almost pulls away, but then she’s kissing him back, and he’s on fire, and he knows right then he’ll never get enough of her for the rest of his life, and he is so much more than okay with that. Because if there’s one thing Bellamy knows he is really, truly good at, it’s loving Clarke Griffin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God I'm sorry for taking so long to finish this. My original ending so didn't fit with the overall tone of the story, and figuring out how to wrap it up was just. It was honestly a nightmare. Thanks so much to all of you who've stuck with me to the end, for your comments and patience. You're the best!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


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